Pysäytetty eloisuus

Finally, that one of the simplest of diseases managed to utterly confound us for so long, at the cost of millions of lives, even after we had stumbled across an unequivocal cure. It makes you wonder how many incurable ailments of the modern world - depression, autism, hypertension, obesity - will turn out to have equally simple solutions, once we are able to see them in the correct light. What will we be slapping our foreheads about sixty years from now, wondering how we missed something so obvious?

Those with echopraxia, for example, compulsively mimic the actions of everyone they come across, and with a speed and abruptness that suggests it's a reflex rather than premeditated. -- The team struck gold when they targeted the left frontal region of the brain, an area known to be involved in motor function. "When we disrupted this area, people started to show an increase in imitative behavior," Bien says

Two recent studies cast doubt that the effect can be achieved in larger mammals. A 2008 study failed to reproduce the effect in pigs, concluding that the effects seen in mice were not present in larger mammals.[23] Likewise a paper by Haouzi et al noted that there is no induction of hypometabolism in sheep, either.[24]